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Disk backup saves hours of downtime for Rous Water

11 March, 2008 09:58

<p>Rous Water, the regional water supply authority for four north-eastern New South Wales council areas, has introduced a risk management solution that protects its operations from any significant disruption caused by computer downtime.</p><p>The authority has implemented StorageCraft ShadowProtect™, the award-winning line of disk-based backup and disaster recovery solutions, which has reduced data loss from a typical 18 hours in the event of a computer crash, to only 15-30 minutes.</p><p>According to IT Manager Alvaro Lozano, the new technology practically eliminates any computer-related disruption to water supplies for the Council areas of Lismore, Ballina, Byron and Richmond Valley. After proving the effectiveness of ShadowProtect on the authority’s management system, he is implementing it on two telemetry servers.</p><p>“If due to a major disaster both of these telemetry servers were to fail, we would be unable to open and close the valves at our reservoirs – we would simply not know what was happening to them,” said Lozano. “Ultimately, Councils could be left without water. Although the probability might be low, the impact would be high, so we are eliminating the risk.”</p><p>The threat of a water management failure isn’t the only difficulty affecting the water authority. Lozano is also concerned with disruptions in day-to-day operations. Recently, one of Rous Water’s systems suffered a major hardware failure when a server crashed, corrupting two years’ worth of archived emails. Using ShadowProtect we were able to restore the network service within 30 minutes.</p><p>Lozano was already seeking to reduce downtime from 18 hours to less than an hour after a server crash, and to do so on a limited budget. The various disk-to-disk backup technologies he tried failed to address his needs for simplicity, flexibility and affordability.</p><p>Lozano said, “The nature of our business requires a rapid response to problems, so we needed a solution that could minimise data loss to minutes instead of an entire day’s worth. StorageCraft’s ShadowProtect has achieved this.</p><p>“What previously meant several hours’ downtime has been reduced to minutes with ShadowProtect. We can recover an entire server on to different hardware and have it fully operational within half an hour. This represents almost immediate disaster recovery. What has impressed us most is its hardware independent restore technology, which works flawlessly and adds only a few minutes to the rebuild process.”</p><p>Previously a server failure meant retrieving the previous night’s backup tape and crossing fingers that it had been backed up correctly. Now ShadowProtect’s real-time recovery technology restores every server, file and mailbox in about 15 minutes.</p><p>Lozano also values the technology’s ability to test backups using integration with VMware. He can test backups with a few mouse clicks and bring up a production server into a non-production virtual environment to prove that backups have worked correctly.</p><p>“This has given me total peace of mind, knowing that that data and databases are protected in real-time,” he says.He cites figures for ShadowProtect’s performance:</p><p>• Recovery time in less than 30 minutes for a complex server; faster on simpler configurations.• Backup windows reduced to 15 minutes for both data and server configurations.• Successful hardware independent restore.• 15-minute backup testing using VMware technology.</p><p>About Rous Water</p><p>Rous Water is the regional water supply authority for the council areas of Lismore (except Nimbin), Ballina (except Wardell), Byron (except Mullumbimby), and Richmond Valley. The regional supply network includes over 32,000 connections and around 2,000 rural connections to the Rous water trunk main system. It services a population of about 95,000.</p><p>About StorageCraft</p><p>StorageCraft Technology Corporation provides innovative disk-based backup, disaster recovery, system migration, data protection and security solutions for servers, desktops and laptops. StorageCraft delivers software products that reduce downtime, improve security and stability for systems and data and lower the total cost of ownership for servers, desktops and laptops. www.storagecraft.com</p><p>For more informationGreg Wyman, StorageCraftRegional Director Asia PacificPhone: +612-9929 9770 or mobile +61-402 259 359Email: Greg.Wyman@storagecraft.com</p><p>David Frost, PR DeadlinesPhone: +612-4341 5021 or mobile +61-408 408 210Email: davidf@prdeadlines.com.au</p>

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